Owner-operators and fleets still have two months to comment on proposed changes to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s CSA carrier Safety Measurement System, which ranks carriers with a percentile in each of seven categories of measurement, from "Unsafe Driving" and HOS categories to "Vehicle Maintenance" and the "Crash Indicator," among others.
As of March 14, just 61 comments had been filed on the public docket. Comments can be made here through May 16, and FMCSA has offered motor carriers of all sizes the ability to preview just how the proposed changes would affect their scores. (Carriers will need to log in with their account and DOT-issued PIN.)
Comments so far on the public docket for the change proposal, and interviews with carriers who've logged in to check their scores in the preview, revealed continued concern about small carriers' scoring. Some carriers, though, expressed general appreciation for some of the changes designed in part to simplify the system and offer carriers a tool they might use for their own back-office improvement.
Among changes to the percentile-ranking system, FMCSA is proposing to reorganize the current categories of measurement, renaming them simply “safety categories,” to better identify specific problems. The agency proposed to combine the current 959 violations used in SMS, plus 14 additional violations not currently used, into 116 new violation groups.
FMCSA wants to move the entire Controlled Substances/Alcohol category, as well as all violations for operating while out-of-service (OOS), into the Unsafe Driving category to “help focus FMCSA’s investigative resources on carriers with higher crash rates,” FMCSA said.
[Related: FMCSA proposes long-overdue CSA carrier Safety Measurement System revamp]
Amber Jenkins, safety director for Henderson, Kentucky-based Silver Creek Transportation, said she could see the wisdom of that change, and that other tweaks in the system, judging by the carrier preview, look to be weighing in the positive for Silver Creek's percentile rankings in most categories..
